Midwestern Women’s Farm Business Roles and Farm Business Financial Satisfaction: An Exploratory Study

The roles of women have been and remain central to the functioning of the family farm business. However, a gap in recent literature on farm women, in general, exists and research is limited regarding women’s farm business roles and their satisfaction with their farm business financial situation. The purpose of this study was to explore factors that impact farm women’s perceptions of farm business financial satisfaction. Results indicated that the importance of financial solvency and satisfaction with one’s farm role were positively associated with women’s farm business financial satisfaction. Holding a primary decision-making role was negatively associated with farm business financial satisfaction. Implications for educators, professionals who work with farm women, and researchers are discussed.     

A Conjugate Class of Utility Functions for Sequential Decision Problems

The use of the conjugacy property for members of the exponential family of distributions is commonplace within Bayesian statistical analysis, allowing for tractable and simple solutions to problems of inference. However, despite a shared motivation, there has been little previous development of a similar property for using utility functions within a Bayesian decision analysis. As such, this article explores a class of utility functions that appear to be reasonable for modeling the preferences of a decisionmaker in many real‐life situations, but that also permit a tractable and simple analysis within sequential decision problems.     

Effective Practices in the Delivery of Research Ethics Education: A Qualitative Review of Instructional Methods

In order to delineate best practices for courses on research ethics, the goal of the present effort was to identify themes related to instructional methods reflected in effective research ethics and responsible conduct of research (RCR) courses. By utilizing a qualitative review, four themes relevant to instructional methods were identified in effective research ethics courses: active participation, case-based activities, a combination of individual and group approaches, and a small number of instructional methods. Three instructional method themes associated with less effective courses were also identified: passive learning, a group-based approach, and a large number of instructional methods. Key characteristics of each theme, along with example courses relative to each theme, are described. Additionally, implications regarding these instructional method themes and recommendations for best practices in research ethics courses are discussed.     

Sexual History and Present Attractiveness: People Want a Mate With a Bit of a Past,But Not Too Much

The aim of this study was to explore how people’s sexual history affects their attractiveness. Using an Internet survey, 188 participants rated their willingness to engage in a relationship with a hypothetical individual with a specified number of past sexual partners, ranging from 0 to 60+. The effect of past partner number was very large. Average willingness ratings initially rose as past partner number rose, but then fell dramatically. For short-term relationships, men were more willing than women to get involved (although the difference was not large). For long-term relationships, in contrast, there was virtually no sex difference. Thus, contrary to the idea that male promiscuity is tolerated but female promiscuity is not, both sexes expressed equal reluctance to get involved with someone with an overly extensive sexual history. Finally, participants with an unrestricted sociosexual orientation (high SO participants) were more tolerant than low SO participants of prospective mates with higher numbers of past sexual partners but were also less tolerant of prospective mates with low numbers of past sexual partners.     

A Modern Day Caesar? Donald Trump and American Caesarism

This article argues that the American political system under Donald Trump is an example of what Antonio Gramsci dubbed “Caesarism,” a situation where a taut balance of warring class forces allows for the emergence of a third force to freeze the antagonism and challenge/usurp established political institutions. To concretise Gramsci's rather abstract formulation and to better illuminate the nature of American Caesarism, this article employs a reading of the Roman poet Lucan's magisterial Civil War. Through a close reading of this text, we can explore the origins of Caesarism and study the efficacy of different means of struggle against it. Lucan thus helps us reinvigorate the concept of Caesarism and apply it in the contemporary American context. In particular, it will be demonstrated that whereas Lucan depicts a progressive form of Caesarism with a qualitatively new state form, the Trump administration embodies a regressive form of Caesarism within an old state form.     

Joking aside: Theorizing laughter in organizations

Humour is becoming an increasingly prevalent topic in organization studies. On the one hand, humour is said to enable workers to undermine management control; on the other hand, humour is said to provide managers with a resource for ensuring compliance with corporate objectives. This paper seeks to challenge the duality found in the literature between rebellious and disciplinary forms of humour by examining the meaning and significance of laughter in organizations. Following Bergson, it will be argued that laughter serves to rectify overly rigid behaviour that has temporarily disrupted the natural elasticity of life. This will serve to attune us to the way in which laughter – whether it is directed at a dominant group or a marginalized group – plays a socially normative role in organizations through processes of ridicule and embarrassment.     

Men, sport, and spinal cord injury: an analysis of metaphors and narrative types

This article draws upon life history data from a small group of men who have experienced spinal cord injury (SCI) through playing the sport of rugby union football and now define themselves as disabled. The salient and most common metaphors used by the men in telling their stories post SCI, and the manner in which this is shaped by three narrative types, is focused upon in detail. The implications of this dynamic process for their identity reconstruction as disabled men are considered.     

THE PROBLEM WITH PREDICTION: CONTINGENCY, EMERGENCE, AND THE REIFICATION OF PROJECTIONS

Here we assess the limitations of "social physics" methods for making predictions of future social conditions in order to contribute to the development of an alternative model of scientific sociology. First, we discuss the complexities inherent in causal analyses of social phenomena, where social organizing principles change historically and causal forces interact to generate outcomes. Second, we analyze the assumptions that underlie prediction in the social sciences by using the population projections of demographers as an illustrative example. Demographers typically make projections assuming the future will be the same as the (recent) past. This approach neglects the possibility of abrupt historical change, contingent events, and emergent social structures. Third, we argue that historical contingency is an essential and necessary consideration in any analysis of the world. A historical materialist approach provides the basis for better formulating nomothetic and idiographic modes of explanation and appreciates the important connections between the two. Sociological inquiry should be an attempt to distinguish between truly nomothetic processes and emergent historical background conditions that only appear nomothetic in a specific historical era. We close with an argument for the importance of developing a sociological science that runs parallel to nonmechanistic approaches in the biological sciences.     

A Method for Ascertaining and Controlling Representation Bias in Field Trials for Airborne Plant Pathogens

The basic premise of running a field trial is that the estimates of treatment effects obtained are representative of how the different treatments will perform in the field. The disparities between the treatment effects observed experimentally, and those that would be observed were the treatments applied to the field, we term 'representation bias.' When looking at field trials testing the efficacies of treatment sprays on plant pathogens, representation bias can be caused by positive and negative inter-plot interference. The potential for such effects will be greatest when looking at pathogens that are dispersed by wind. In this paper, a computer simulation that simulates plant disease dispersal under such conditions is described. This program is used to quantify the amount of representation bias occurring in various experimental situations. Through this, the relationships between field design parameters and representation bias are explored, and the importance of plot dimension and spacing, as well as treatment to plot allocation, emphasized.     

Trusting in Social Work

Two successive terms of a New Labour government have requiredsocial work practice in the UK to occupy a particular publicpolicy context that is, at best, indifferent and, at worst,hostile to some of the professional interests and traditionalconstituencies of social workers. In this paper, the immediatepast editors of the Journal reflect on how social work has soughtto adapt and survive under these conditions, as revealed inthe papers published during the period of their stewardship.